PIBLOKTO

On the coast of the Arctic Ocean of Chukotka live a people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting walruses and whales and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. The film is a meditative reflection on death.

From the outset, the shaman’s drum beats twist the seemingly “direct”  images of Piblokto: although the anthropologist Anastasia Shubina and her associate Timofey Glinin film a community living on the Arctic fringes of Siberia, their approach is not designed to simply render a scientific or picturesque account, but to make a film that draws its poetry from the reality of a people for whom hunting marine mammals is still a means of survival. A poetry that bites like the cold and roars like the sea, from where men drag a whale or walrus that will be sliced into pieces. To depict this existence, the filmmakers relinquish any didactic mission as well as narrative continuity, and privilege a sensory logic. The sharp, contrasted images portray an immersion in collective movements where men and beasts intermingle. No contextualisation is offered, as the filmmakers prefer to emphasize the ritual aspects of these actions by including repeated motifs. The spoken word gives rise to stories that take on a mythical dimension (a man once gifted two of his fingers to the sea). “Piblokto”, a term coined by Westerners, denotes what they viewed as mental illness, but which could also indicate the presence of spirits. In taking it as the title, the filmmakers lay claim to the necessary ambiguity of their stance vis-à-vis this territory, and of our gaze on these images: we cannot help but project our vision of the world. Like this shamanistic practice that invites a person to visualise their own skeleton and be liberated from fear forever, the film offers us an intercultural ritual that organises the encounter between different relationships to nature and to death.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian